Trade Post.... One deal and three sets are completed

I primarily consider  myself a set collector. The only problem with that - I'm horrible at actually finishing off sets. My attention is usually diverted by something else roughly 85% of the way through any given set. One of my goals this year is to clean some sets up and finish them off, especially any set that I'm at least 90% of the way through.

With that in mind I made an offer on TCDB to user mfeik for a 2003 Topps Ichiro Award Winner card which was the last one I needed to complete that wonderfully blue-bordered set. While building the trade I noticed he also had the one last 1990 Donruss card (it's always been one more card with that damn set).  I had some random Tigers cards he needed so we worked out a deal.

Yesterday they showed up in the mail.

I appreciate any Ichiro card that I can add to my collection. He may not have been the best baseball player I've ever watched live, but he is definitely the most graceful. Everything he did had a casual elegant smoothness to it. He never seemed hurried or our of sorts. God damn, he was fun to watch.

A card I didn't even know I didn't have until I started paging up The Red Menace. That was not a great collecting day. There are over 2500 1990 Donruss cards under my roof right now and not one of them was of the first (only?) man to strike out 5,000 major league hitters. It's quite satisfying to finally put that set to rest.

Wait...the title said three sets were completed? Which one was the third?

Well, mfeik was gracious enough to throw in a few extras. Along with three 2006 Topps cards I needed he knocked off the last three 1988 Topps cards I needed. Yup, that one only took 32 years to finish/ Along with Julio Franco (#683) and Jim Acker (#678) came this card:

The Bash Brothers in their prime bashing years. Twelve-year-old Justin would have been stoked to pull this card out off a pack. 

Thank you mfeik for helping out. According to TCDB I have 17 more sets that are over 90% complete.  Hopefully I can focus on them for a bit and knock that list down a bit more.

Orioles Victory Card Number 21: 1990 Donruss, aka The Red Plague

Baltimore Orioles Victory Number 21: 4-2 over the Toronto Blue Jays

1990 Donruss Randy Milligan

In every collection tucked into a closet or spread out in a basement there is one set that a collector has way too many cards of.  For me, it's 1990 Donruss. Distinctive because of it's red borders and copious amount of errors, variations and mistakes, this set is the epitome of the overproduced neo-vintage (aka junk wax) era of the early to mid-90s that almost killed the hobby.

I bought a lot of these cards.  I mean A LOT of them. At 50 cents per pack of 16 cards it was easy to accumulate a large quantity cheaply and quickly. Oddly enough, despite buying four or five packs a week for most of the summer, I didn't actually complete the set until two years ago or so as there were a handful of cards that I somehow missed during my initial collecting days.

In the meantime I picked up a lot of doubles. As of this posting, I have about 2,547 cards for this set. The completed set is only 716 cards so yeah that leads to quite a few duplicates.  While that 2500+ number is impressive, I've also probably given away roughly 600 cards in the last couple of years. Any trade I've made in the last three years where the recipient had 1990 Donruss cards on their wantlist received a handful or more of them even if they didn't ask for them. 

Until recently I didn't really check to see if I was sending out error cards instead of actual duplicates since, except for the most notorious ones, there really wasn't much difference between the correct card and the error card. The Trading Card Database lists 89 variations or errors in the set with the most famous being the Juan Gonzalez reverse negative, a card that was highly sought after that summer.

Errors like that are rather easy to detect, others not so much. Along with incorrect birth dates or checklists with the wrong numbers listed there were the cards with a line through a letter. Such as this Kevin Hickey card. Who even notices that? Not me that's for sure.

Despite the overabundance it remains one of my favorite sets because it came during my peak collecting run as a kid. Cards were still affordable, card shops plentiful and people traded in person. By 1992 other things had intervened in life and collecting fell onto the backburner for about a decade.

The set also had all the hallmarks of those early Donruss sets. The first 26 cards were Diamond Kings, supposedly the best players of each respective team (Micky Tettleton had the honor for the Orioles). Those cards were followed by the Rated Rookies, each adorned with the iconic blue logo. As much fun as those cards were to get in a pack, Donruss kind of whiffed in their selection as the most recognizable rookies in the set (Sammy Sosa, Larry Walker, Bernie Williams, David Justice, and John Olerud) didn't receive the Rated Rookie status. 

There were also an early form of inserts in the set as packs might contain the Bonus MVP or Grand Slammers sets in addition to the regular base cards. Donruss kept up their awesome quality control in these inserts as well because I'm pretty sure this isn't John Smoltz:

Flipping through the set to send out some more duplicates is always a fun trip down memory lane.